Gravity Forms is currently one of the most popular WordPress plugins, and for a good reason. What are the benefits of Gravity forms? The plugin allows you to create functional, powerful, and customizable web forms. You can use these to boost your email marketing campaign, collect user feedback, and enable customers to contact you.
Among other things, you can customize your forms, generate polls to engage users, share entertaining quizzes to evoke feedback, and even roll out surveys to gather useful data.
If you're not using the plugin on your WordPress site, or think it is only for simple contact forms, the following are four reasons to change your mind.
Stripe needs no introduction. The payment gateway and processor serves over 1.7 million websites worldwide and at least 138,000 businesses in the US. Many users are especially attracted to Stripe's developer-friendly design.
Gravity Forms has partnered with the payment company to offer you an add-on that you can install to start accepting Stripe payments securely and automatically.
A major advantage of this partnership is that it reduces your responsibility for handling and securing payments and sensitive customer information as Stripe handles that process. Since Stripe serves as a Merchant of Record, you're also protected from liability arising from payment processing issues. This add-on allows your customers to process payments with ease.
Yes, this is a quick and easy way to create donation forms, product forms, and even consulting services payment forms. No-fuss, simple to set up and yet quite powerful.
You may not be familiar with MailerLite - the email marketing platform that is a rising cost-effective competitor to Mailchimp. They offer a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish web forms on your website, and Gravity forms have also partnered with the company, allowing users to integrate MailerLite into their Gravity forms so you can enjoy the best of both worlds.
This means several things. For one, MailerLite is best known for email campaign automation. Once users complete the Gravity form and opt-in, they can be added to a list to get automated email nurture campaigns (regular, A/B split, auto-resend, or RSS) on auto-pilot. Additionally, MailerLite helps with audience segmentation and the management of popup and embedded forms. This is powerful because most other email platforms require you to pay for email nurture automation campaigns but using Gravity forms and MailLite you have it all.
The Gravity MailerLite add-on brings all these valuable features to Gravity forms, which can significantly benefit your web sales and conversion ratios.
Like it or not, web forms will always attract spammers. These are typically hackers looking to gain access to your business system or to steal information from your customers.
Until recently, marketers have used Captcha fields to identify and prevent spamming activities. This has worked relatively well for the most part. Unfortunately, Captcha features are also rather ugly and sometimes frustrating.
The Gravity Anti-Spam Honeypot feature solves this problem by adding an extra field to the form, hidden from view using JavaScript. Real users won't see the field, but spambots will see it and fill it in. Gravity Forms then flags the filled forms as spam, helping to keep spammers at bay.
Finally, Gravity has revolutionized how we design and create web forms by making it possible to build forms through drag-and-drop.
To get started, just navigate to the Forms menu and select New Form. You'll be presented with a box asking you to provide a title and description of the new form. Once that's done, click Create Form to start adding fields.
To add a field to your form, just click on the desired field and it will be added to the form. You can then edit the fields as you wish by hovering over them. If you wish to reorder the fields, drag and drop them to the desired location on the form. Easy, right?
These are just a few examples of the great benefits of Gravity Forms. As well as, other advantages, including conditional logic and data validation, which can significantly simplify the form-creation process. As well, Gravity forms stores entries on your website and gives you a convenient way to download the data from any form. Start using Gravity Forms today to experience the benefits for your website and business.
Looking for help? Tired and believing there has got to be a better way?
Let's talk about your business. With over a decade of experience leading companies and transforming lives, and a Master's degree in Org. Development and Leadership, Mike can help you find the best way forward!
Contact Mike today to start the breakthrough!
With the current ongoing pandemic, video conferencing is becoming the new norm for people working from home, for both professional and personal meetings. As a result, the Zoom video conferencing app became increasingly popular for many reasons. Besides supporting up to 1000 video participants and 10,000 viewers, it allowed for seamless interactions.
However, like any in-demand internet communication platform, Zoom was preyed upon by Cybersecurity threats, the latest being its vulnerability to in-conference hacking attacks. The platform potentially allowed remote hackers to use the “share screen control” feature to take control of users' computers and potentially steal login credentials. Zoom has since increased security protocols and does not allow entry into meetings without admission procedures by default now. One option for businesses, personal users, and organizations if you are looking for a better and free video conferencing alternative is Jitsi.
UPDATE: Jitsi was acquired by 8x8 in 2018.
Jitsi, as mentioned, is a video conferencing application with some powerful features. These include the ability to password-protect meetings and remove people from a conference. What has made it a popular alternative to zoom is that it is free for longer than 40-minute meetings. Users can either download the software and use it or more commonly join their colleagues through web browsers. Jitsi currently supports a maximum of 75 participants. However, keeping participants below 35 is recommended for optimum performance.
Setting up a call with Jitsi is super simple. Head over to the Jitsi official call page and click the “start a new meeting” icon. Enter your desired meeting name, ensuring it is unique, and start the call. Since privacy lags are what made Zoom flimsy, you can add a password for your meeting by clicking the “I” icon at the bottom right corner of your device screen right after starting the meeting.
Once set up, what follows is inviting friends to the conference. Jitsi makes this process easy by creating a meeting URL that you can share for friends or colleagues to join the meeting. You can text, email, or signal them to join the meeting. Ensure that you provide the meeting password for them to log in. Unlike Zoom, as noted, Jitsi doesn’t have time limits for calls. You can chat with business colleagues and family for hours as needed.
During the call, Jitsi allows users to engage in many ways. To begin with, depending on your internet speed, you can choose different levels of video quality. The four levels range from low definition for slow connections to high definition for fast internet connections. Secondly, you can Livestream your conference to YouTube or record it and upload it to your Dropbox account.
While on the call, Jitsi allows users to share YouTube videos, single application windows, browser tabs, and even the entire computer screen with other members in the meeting. You can also blur the background for privacy reasons. If your meeting centers on discussions, there is a “raise your hand” icon, which allows participants to coordinate seamlessly. Click on the icon to signal your readiness to contribute or share your thoughts on the topic of discussion. There is also a text chat feature.
Jitsi is a free and reliable video conferencing tool that highly competes with paid video conferencing applications. While some people are perfectly content with the web version that offers several features, the tool also prompts users to install a browser extension that securely integrates with Google and Outlook Calendar. This enables users to track their upcoming events with ease.
If you are looking for a free alternative to Zoom for video conferencing, Jitsi is a quality tool to look at.
Looking for help? Tired and believing there has got to be a better way?
Let’s talk about your business. With over a decade of experience leading companies and transforming lives, and a Master’s degree in Org. Development and Leadership, Mike can help you find the best way forward!
Contact Mike today to start the breakthrough!
Times have changed! The "cloud" has evolved for business technology users.
In particular, software has evolved, shifting from computer software to web software.
What we used to need to do with 5 CD's to install on a computer is now available online, anytime, AND on our phones!
In this livecast recording, we dive into web tools for productivity including a load of the latest tools for small and medium-sized businesses. As well, we discuss how the shift to cloud software impacts business productivity.
I'm joined by Now Marketing Group President, Jessika Phillips, and MOS Training founder Donna Gilliland in this Halftime Mike episode discussing new tools and their uses. More than just social media tools, we dive into core business use apps and tools that we use online. Jessika is an early tech adopter and discusses the tools her business uses along with their core product for clients, HubSpot. And Donna is a tool trainer! From social media, to Microsoft, to mobile apps, Donna is hired by businesses and business units to deliver staff training on how to use the tools productively.
It's a grand lineup of educated business folk and we each deliver tools and learn about new tools from each other!
[powerpress]
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Nearly all social media tools started online, very few were computer-based software for managing your social. Here's our "go to" list of tools for social media management. Listen in to the livecast for the details on how we use each!
For use in word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and Storage
Being able to access your information anywhere, anytime, is becoming critically important. Having your bookkeeping online, for example, is a powerful way to keep current with your invoicing and business expenses. When it is online, you can access at the office, at home, while traveling, and take advantage of other tools like the Quickbooks mobile app that the QB Online users have access to.
Moving to these web tools is increasing becoming important! What tools did we miss and what are your favorites from those mentioned? Tell us below!!
It’s always about taking away learnings and applying them! What’s the key takeaway that you need to act on in the next 24 hours based on listening to this?
Help Spread the Word! Please let your Twitter followers know about this podcast. Simply click here now to post a tweet >>. If you enjoyed this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast, please “go over to iTunes, leave a rating, write a review and subscribe! Thank you so much for your support!
I’m an Indiana Hoosier native where basketball is the top sport. Every team heads to the locker room at halftime to evaluate the first half and create a updated plan for the second half. That plan includes adjustments based on reviewing what worked and what didn't. The “halftime” is a key review point where the game stops, the team pulls away to huddle in the locker room away from the fans, and they come out prepared and ready to succeed in the second half.
That’s what this podcast is all about, taking the time to pull away for a bit to evaluate, learn, and set some strategies for your business to succeed in the second half. Join me by subscribing and let me be your “business halftime” to help you find great success going forward!
Subscribe via iTunes: Halftime Mike on iTunes | Android users via RSS | Listen on Stitcher.
